Scare Quotes Alert

New York Times:

Egypt entered a perilous 48 hours on Monday when the military delivered an ultimatum to the country’s first democratically elected president, hundreds of thousands of protesters renewed calls to oust him from office and the president’s Islamists allies vowed to take to the streets to stop what they called “a military coup.”

Sorry, that's not a "military coup", that's a military coup. I'm not even condemning it, I just think it needs to be called by the right name.

The whole thing is pretty sad. It would have been so nice if Morsi had been able to succeed, in some degree, in establishing a general comfort level with constitutionality, and I thought Muslim Brothers' experience in providing social services would help. Power, as usual, corrupted. The MB insistence on writing the constitution on their own wasn't a good thing; they could have had a more Westminstery system, with some built-in instability, which makes it easier to get rid of an obnoxious Leader without tearing down the entire system, but that would have meant leaving doors open for all sorts of little parties.

As I always say with reference to Egypt it's up to the liberals, once again, to give the poor and struggling majority some reason to vote for them. Last time they were too involved with white-girl problems; maybe this time the visible presence of the People in the protests will make a difference.

Photo by AP via Huffington Post.

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt! (addendum)

Eggs Definitely Look Better with Mustaches. By Ben at LikeCool.com.

 Friedman manages to admit his error, sort of:

I was critical of Egypt’s new president, Mohamed Morsi, from the Muslim Brotherhood, for attending the Nonaligned Movement summit meeting in Iran. I argued that he was giving legitimacy to an Iranian regime that had crushed the very kind of democratic movement that brought Morsi to power. But Morsi surprised me, for the better, by using his visit to Tehran to call out the Iranian leadership for supporting Syria’s “oppressive” regime. The Iranians were livid. You can be sure that, on other days, Morsi will say and do things that will give us indigestion. We still need Egypt’s strategic support in the region. It still needs our economic aid. But a more democratic, Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt will not behave like the automatic ally it was before. We’ll need a new kind of relationship. It will be complicated.

Or, in the more spaciously crazy terms of his blog, Really Tom Friedman:

So it’s complicated. Which is why, last week, when I said Mohammed Morsi was handing the keys to the revolution over to the mullahs at the used-revolution dealership and it turned out he was just getting valet parking at a brand-new restaurant called Pimp Slap the Islamic Republic, I was mistaken. What Morsi took Iran to task about, well, who can remember?

The soldiers have turned down the Sidi Touré and explained that the Egypt-Iran kerfuffle was over Syria. Which I knew already, but have put my fingers in my ears to avoid hearing again.

I guess he really got face on his egg, heh-heh.

Airborne Elephant Watch: Tehran!

Thomas P. Friedman (I don't know why I keep calling him that, his middle initial is L) leapt into it at the last minute yesterday as if terrified of missing an opportunity to be totally wrong, as he was, chiding Egypt's president Morsi for attending the meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran:

Excuse me, President Morsi, but there is only one reason the Iranian regime wants to hold the meeting in Tehran and have heads of state like you attend, and that is to signal to Iran’s people that the world approves of their country’s clerical leadership and therefore they should never, ever, ever again think about launching a democracy movement — the exact same kind of democracy movement that brought you, Mr. Morsi, to power in Egypt.

Flying Elephants. By Tattoomaus78 at DeviantArt.

Because what Morsi signaled to Iran's people turned out to be quite different, more along the lines of the world disapproves of their country's clerical leadership and democracy movements of the kind that brought him to power are eminently praiseworthy, especially in Syria—the Iranian foreign minister walked out, while poor little president Ahmadinejad squirmed, I guess, on the dais next to the fulminating Egyptian.

“The Syrian people are fighting with courage, looking for freedom and human dignity,” Mr. Morsi said, suggesting that all parties at the gathering shared responsibility for the bloodshed. “We must all be fully aware that this will not stop unless we act.”

Mr. Morsi, pointedly, did not mention unrest in Bahrain, possibly to avoid offending Saudi Arabia, which has helped Bahrain’s monarchy suppress the uprising.

Then the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, noted that the Holocaust really did take place. Actually virtually all educated Iranians, including the country's 25,000 Jews, are aware of this; the purpose of mentioning it was to remind them that Ahmadinejad doesn't care whether people think he is educated or not—the nation's crude, embarrassing brother-in-law. Ban also scolded the leaders for inattention to human rights and for lack of transparency in their nuclear affairs, and a splendid time was had by all.

None of this will persuade Friedman, of course. He's so committed to working out his model of who's bad and who's good that he can't think about anything getting better. But Morsi is fast replacing old Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in my heart as favorite post-Islamist politician. His current démarche on the subject of Syria, cutting Iran in (as is self-evidently necessary) and therefore inevitably cutting the US out, seems like the first idea anybody has had about Syria that could lead to a reduction in the number of killings instead of a further increase.

And Friedman? Suck. On. That.

From The Garlic.